- Dune: Part Two
- Directed by: Denis Villeneuve
- Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Austin Butler
- Sci-Fi/Adventure | PG-13 | 2 hr 46 min
Dune: Part Two comes at an interesting crossroads for big budget, genre, franchise filmmaking. The past few years, the Marvel machine has slowed to a creative and commercial crawl, culminating in this past November’s The Marvels, which failed to cross $100 million domestically and didn’t even make back its budget worldwide. Where the MCU (and some other superhero franchises that rode the wave) has dominated the past 15 years of box office returns, there’s a vacuum.
Seemingly, and perhaps somewhat optimistically on my part, true blue movie stars are stepping in to fill the void. Already this year, we’ve seen bigtime smashes in Anyone But You (starring Sidney Sweeney and Glen Powell), the first rom-com in what seems like a decade to make a box office impact, and Bob Marley: One Love (starring Kingsley Ben-Adir), straightforward biopic without the spectacle of something like Oppenheimer. Both received middling reviews, but both did, and continue to do, big business, thanks in part to their young, popular leads.
There essentially hasn’t been space at the theaters for those kinds of movies since the Avengers defended the Earth in the Battle of New York. Undoubtedly, the MCU was stacked with stars, but the franchise subsumed those stars for the benefit of a grand narrative and The Brand—people went to the theater to see what Captain America was up to and not necessarily Chris Evans. This past year (with Barbie and Oppenheimer as two of the top three hits), and so far in 2024, that tide is turning.
Again, I may be overly optimistic and nostalgic about a time when movie stars really mattered, but it’s something to watch as the year progresses, especially given that many bigtime franchise projects got pushed to 2025 after the strikes, and 2024 promises many opportunities to test the theory (Challengers, starring Zendaya; Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt; Furiosa, staring Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth; The Bikeriders, starring Austin Butler; Twisters, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell; Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, starring Jenna Ortega; Gladiator 2, starring Denzel Washington and Paul Mescal; and Wicked, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, to name a few).
That brings us to Dune: Part Two. Sure, it’s a sci-fi franchise following Dune: Part One’s success, but Part Two is unequivocally a star vehicle, which helps elevate it beyond the sheer spectacle of its predecessor. Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, and Austin Butler are stars, full stop, and their presence levels up the film. That’s far from what makes the film special, though, and setting the larger questions of star-making in Hollywood aside, Dune: Part Two is exhilarating to watch. Part Two carries over the jaw-dropping visuals and production design of Part One, but it has a lot more to say, and a lot more emotional weight.
It’s clear why Villeneuve, a director known for actively dismissing dialogue in favor of image making, has wanted to adapt Dune for so long. Where others saw an incredibly complex book filled with sci-fi minutia that was near-unadaptable, Villeneuve saw iconography leap off the page that absolutely deserved grand cinematic treatment. In fact, the only parts of Part Two that drag are those that get mired in plot detail—necessary but stifling when fitted between Paul riding a sand worm and Feyd-Rautha battling in the Harkonnen arena. Dune: Part Two represents truly audacious filmmaking on a grand scale, and its success hopefully foretells great things to come, not only for the Dune story, but for the industry at large.
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